All sounds are characterized by changes in amplitude and frequency. The auditory systems of humans and many mammals are sensitive to changes in amplitude and frequency. In the cochlear implants that have heretofore been available, only amplitude changes are extracted and encoded.
The cochlear implants of the prior art have generally employed two types of sound encoding strategies. In one type, only amplitude modulations are extracted and modulate a fixed rate carrier. see, Wilson et al., Better Speech Recognition With Cochlear Implants, Nature. 1991 July 18;352(6332):236-8.In the other type, filtered raw analog waveforms (including amplitude, frequency modulations and many other components) are delivered directly to electrodes to stimulate the neurons. see, Eddington et al., Auditory Prostheses Research With Multiple Channel Intracochlear Stimulation In Man, Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol, 1978, 87 (6 Pt 2), 1-39.
Others have attempted to encode fundamental frequency (Fo) in cochlear implants. see, Geurts L, Wouters J., Coding Of The Fundamental Frequency In Continuous Interleaved Sampling processors for cochlear implants, J Acoust Soc Am. 2001 February;109(2):713-26; Faulkner A, Rosen S, Smith C., Effects Of The Salience Of Pitch And Periodicity Information On The Intelligibility Of Four-Channel Vocoded Speech: Implications For Cochlear Implants, J Acoust Soc Am. 2000 October; 108(4):1877-87.
In audio compression, there has been some recent research using amplitude and frequency modulations to encode speech. see, Potaminanos, A and Maragos P., Speech Analysis And Synthesis Using An AM-FM Modulation Model, Speech Communication, 1999:28, 195-209 Their studies are generally used to extract and trace frequency modulations at or near the format frequency, which varies by itself and has to be encoded during transmission. The present strategy will extract and code only frequency modulations at a fixed center frequency of a narrow band, which is known a priori in both the coder and the decoder, and needs not to be transmitted.
In cochlear implants, either amplitude modulation (only) or the analog waveform is encoded. One of them provides too little (AM only) while the other provides too much indiscriminable information. In audio coding, the encoding strategy has traditionally been considered from the speech production perspective and little perceptual information except for masking is used.
Although there exists a substantial body of knowledge relating to frequency modulation in basic auditory research, there has been little or no work done to encode frequency modulation in cochlear implants (or any other neural prosthetic devices) and use it in audio compression.